New debates over old
horrors: the Holocaust and the writing of history

By Jay Tolson

AS the proceedings of David Irving v. Penguin Books
Ltd. and Deborah Lipstadt enter their fourth week
in a London court, many observers are at odds about what is
really at stake. Legally the issue is clear: Did an Emory
University professor libel a British writer by calling him a
"Holocaust denier" who distorts historical evidence to suit
"his ideological leanings and political agenda"? But there
are greater questions at hand -- including whether the
general public cares about, or even recognizes, reasonable
standards of historical accuracy.

Irving,
61, a Hitler apologist and author of numerous World War
II-era histories and biographies (The
Destruction of Dresden, Hitler's War), prides himself
on the detailed research that has earned some of his books
the qualified praise of John Keegan, Hugh
Trevor-Roper, and other respected historians. He charges
that Lipstadt's Denying the Holocaust:
The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory impugns his
work and threatens his livelihood. Part of that livelihood
was derived from speeches he gave to neo-Nazi audiences in
Germany and Austria, where, among other things, he dismissed
the crematoriums at Auschwitz
as tourist attractions built by the Polish communist regime
after World War II. Now banned from Austria, Italy, and
Canada for
violating laws against denying the Nazi genocide, he claims
he is not a denier but only one who challenges the scope and
means of Jewish killings and the fact of Hitler's
involvement in the Final Solution.

How to argue. Some who are following the case have
asserted that the Holocaust itself is on trial -- or at
least its scope and means. Alan Gold, a novelist who
has written about the denial phenomenon, says it is nothing
less than "a case that will test the facts upon which the
deniers stake their claim to history." Yet others say that
the trial raises questions about whether or how reputable
historians should argue with deniers. "I used to wonder why
you even dignify such an absurd position," says historian
Eric A. Johnson. But given the influence of deniers,
Johnson suspects they can no longer be ignored. The danger,
as many scholars acknowledge, is in creating the impression
that deniers represent merely another side of a reasonable
debate -- like the one over global warming, for example.
Still, Lipstadt and her English publisher felt they had to
fight Irving, even though the plaintiff would have accepted
a settlement of 500 pounds (about $800). "If we settled, we
would be agreeing that we libeled him," says Helena
Peacock, head of the legal department at Penguin Books.
"It would have been a win for him."

It's tempting to say that the outcome of the trial will
have nothing to do with the reality of the Holocaust. "It's
more about the silliness of English libel law," says
Walter Reich, a professor at George Washington
University and former director of the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum. (Compared with U.S. law, British libel law
puts a much greater burden on the defendant.) Yet some
historians maintain that the trial may have serious
ramifications for how the Nazi genocide is talked about,
studied, and represented. One concern that is often raised
regards the burgeoning "Holocaust industry," by which is
meant everything from museums and memorials to Steven
Spielberg's film projects to Holocaust-studies programs.
David Cesarani, a professor of Jewish history at
Southampton University in England, vigorously defends
"opposing neo-Nazism and the Holocaust denial that is
associated with it." But he cites respectable academics who
argue that memorializing efforts are "being used wrongly or
simply getting out of hand," in some cases triggering a
backlash that benefits deniers such as Irving.

In his recent Holocaust in American
Life, University of Chicago historian Peter
Novickargues
that American Jewish leaders have used the Holocaust to
advance a range of agendas, including bolstering ethnic
identity and galvanizing support for Israel. And while he
acknowledges the anxiety many people feel as survivors pass
away and the Holocaust "recedes into the past, into 'mere'
history," he is concerned that too much emphasis on
memorializing can lead to a corrupted understanding of what
history is. "For the most part, deniers are crazed
positivists," Novick says. "They think one fact can prove or
disprove everything, which is why they all seize on the fact
that there is no written document in which Hitler orders the
Final Solution and ignore all other evidence."

These battles come at a time when historians are
presenting compelling new evidence and analysis of how the
genocide was carried out. Eric Johnson's new book,
Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and
Ordinary Germans, for instance, presents a very
different understanding of everyday German involvement from
the one set out in Daniel Goldhagen's controversial
-- and bestselling -- Hitler's Willing
Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.
Goldhagen drew heavily on the behavior of police battalions
in Poland to demonstrate that "eliminationist anti-Semitism"
extended far beyond Hitler and the Nazi Party elite to
include most ordinary Germans. Johnson, concentrating on
Gestapo interactions with citizens in three German towns,
sees a far greater range of citizen reaction, from direct
participation (spying on neighbors) to silent acceptance of
the Final Solution, which most knew was going on. "Silent
complicity is horrible," Johnson explains, "but we have to
see it in a more nuanced light than Goldhagen's blanket
condemnation." Finding the "local Eichmanns" more culpable
than most ordinary citizens, Johnson shows how the Nazi
regime shaped social psychology from 1933 on.

Fine line. Maybe what is most at stake in the Irving
trial is the ability of the public to distinguish between
this kind of nuanced historical revisionism (and honest
disagreements among revisionists) and the outright
distortions that are found not only in books but in neo-Nazi
and antisemitic Web sites throughout the Internet. Writing
in February's Atlantic Monthly,
D. D. Guttenplan sees the case as testing a fine but
important line between revisionists, who re-examine the
policies and perpetrators of the Final Solution, and
deniers, who resort to half-truths or shoddy proof to deny
or minimize the Holocaust.

Complicating the issue, Guttenplan writes, is that even
reputable scholars sometimes get attacked for questioning
any of the supposedly established facts about the Holocaust.
And when these scholars are blocked from doing their work,
"the result is a blurring of distinctions between memory and
propaganda that serves only the interests of the Nazi
perpetrators and their political legatees." There is a world
of difference, he writes, between Raul
Hilberg, whose monumental
Destruction of the Jews (1961)
drew fire merely by lowering the estimated number of Jewish
deaths from 6 million to 5.1 million, and, say, Fred
Leuchter, a designer of execution devices who used
questionable experiments to "prove" that there were no gas
chambers at the Auschwitz and Birkenau death camps.
(Leuchter, whose findings have been endorsed and used by
Irving, is the subject of a current documentary,
Mr. Death.)

Because such distinctions have been blurred, Irving and
similar deniers have been able to wrap themselves in the
respectable mantle of revisionism -- and sow doubt among the
general public. Signs of their success should give pause. A
1993 Roper Organization poll found that 22 percent of
Americans thought it possible that the Holocaust never
occurred. Unfortunately, a victory by Irving might win more
converts to that muddled skepticism.